What do you want to do?

Learn more about doing source control activities in a SharePoint workspace

Just as on a SharePoint site, it is not strictly necessary to check out documents in order to edit them. If you open, edit and save changes to a document, your updates will automatically get uploaded to the SharePoint server at the next synchronization. There is one clear advantage to editing documents without checking them out: Every time you save updates to a document, these updates can be uploaded to the server for other users to read. Conversely, if you check out a document, any updates you make are not uploaded to the SharePoint site until you check in.

You might consider checking out documents for any of the following reasons:

You want to prevent other people from editing the same document and causing editing conflicts.

Other people may have editing access to the same documents directly on the SharePoint site. If you check out these documents in the SharePoint workspace, other people can still view a read-only version of it, but only you can edit them.

You want to upload updates to documents only when you are done editing them.

If you are making substantial edits to a document, you may prefer to keep these updates unpublished until you have completed your work.

Checking in documents

Discarding a checkout

You may sometimes decide that you do not want to keep updates you have made in a checked out document, and you therefore want to revert the document to its version before you checked it out. In this case you can simply discard a checkout.

Select the documents for which you want to discard a checkout.

On the Home tab, click Discard Check Out.

Click Yes to confirm that you want to discard changes you have not checked in.